jwplayer freezing

Hi all,

We are about to launch a live-streaming website and are having some issues with streams periodically and frequently freezing in jwplayer (if you hit pause and then play again, jwplayer will pick up the stream again, until it freezes again). This occurs in our current tests even with only a single inbound and outbound stream, in locations with what should be more than sufficient network speeds. We have a custom-built encoder and are using wowza streaming engine on a basic AWS EC2 instance.

We had modified the Application.xml file under conf/live during our development, and tried to resort back to the original Application.xml file, and that turned out to make the stream basically unplayable (massive numbers of dropped packets). This makes us think/hope that the current problem may be resolvable with fine tuning of some of the wowza settings, but aren't quite sure what to change.

Here is a diff between the original Application.xml and the one we are currently using. I'm sure that most of this is totally irrelevant but figured I'd post all the differences for completeness. If anyone has any ideas or thoughts about what to further change to possibly resolve this problem, we'd be grateful. Thanks!

> <Description>Default application for live streaming created when Wowza Streaming Engine is installed. Use this application with its default configuration or modify the configuration as needed. You can also copy it to create another live application.</Description>

2 Replies

If you want to reset the application to the default settings, you can replace the Application.xml file for the application with the default Application.xml file located in [wowza-install]conf/Application.xml

Or, you can create a new application and test the stream with a default environment to see if the problem persists.

If it continues to freeze with the default settings, then you would want to look at bitrate of the stream vs bandwidth at the client. Maybe a lower bitrate, or perhaps Adaptive bit rate stream.

Thanks for your response. To clarify, when we use the default Application.xml file, it basically doesn't work. When we use a modified version, it works pretty well, but not perfectly (i.e., jwplayer still freezes). The content I posted was the difference between the original file and the modified version. I suspect a big chunk of the difference is the single line about the low-latency stream. We're looking for any other hints or tips about what else to change.

Sorry for the delayed reply. If you are still having an issue with this please run Wowza until the freeze happens, then zip up your /conf and/logs folders and open a ticket with support by following the steps outlined here